This session turns to 20th-century black literature to explore alternative orientations toward visibility. Foregrounding texts that depict the character of quotidian black life under regimes of anti-blackness and other forms of unfreedom, these thinkers assay a range of reading strategies to critique interrelated notions of perceptibility, transparency, visibility, and recognition. In an ocularcentric regime, where racial determinism is a matter of appearances, they find that these notions tend to operate as strategies of power. Incorporating W.E.B. DuBois, Eduoard Glissant, and Kimberly Juanita Brown’s understandings of how visibility shapes the modern subject, panelists think with and against binary conceptualizations such as visible and invisible, examining their ramifications on questions of legibility, transparency, and recognition. These scholars recognize how visual forms and stakes are influenced by anti-black structures, evident in the application of resistance frameworks that unveil black survival strategies. The focus of these investigations is on what is obstructed, hidden, unnoticed, and disguised by the intersection of gender and race, given prevailing modes of understanding. Responsively, this session troubles this interpretive schema by exploring the possibilities within underexamined terrains of black literature. From a galvanizing read of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a timeless illustration of the depth of racialization to the Western fabric, an impression of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) as a searing sketch of the limits of legibility, to a poignant meditation on how Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (2023) solicits readers to tarry in the unknowable, this session broaches visibility's restaints to consider how the representational force of black women raises the stakes of revelation and invites a critique of dominant modes of seeing, knowing, and being.

The session's timeliness is underscored by its resonance with the conference's location in post-Katrina New Orleans, which exemplifies how black life is lived in the liminal. One panelist will highlight how Hurricane Katrina's redemptive narrative, reliant on images of displaced black individuals, reduced black existence to perpetual struggle. This posture dictates that interpretations of black literature be preoccupied with countering stilted images to the detriment of other kinds of exegetical approaches. Thus, while this panel sojourns within the space(s) and place(s) assumed non-existent or overlooked, it also urges an acute evaluation of knowledge practices. Given ongoing attacks against black literature, understanding the limitations of analytical methods is crucial. This critical urgency will attract an audience seeking practical approaches. Additionally, the panel's emphasis on black liminality's breadth invites our audience to dialogue about the historical and contemporary development of visibility as an evolving settler colonial technology. To stimulate this discussion, our presider, Will Mosely, will offer an indigenous land acknowledgment, welcome guests, impose a 15-minute speaking limit, pose questions to the presenters, and solicit audience queries.

The session will begin with Ellen Louis', “Seeing Double in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” wherein she probes the text asking how modes of recognition elude the author. Louis reads Chesnutt’s text in search of the figure of the double. She suggests the literary device elaborates what Toni Morrison calls “the sycophancy of white identity” and the concomitant centrality of anti-blackness to the modern world. Louis interprets Chesnutt’s tropological double as key for evincing the arbitrary and unabated degradation of blackness, for the sake of securing the contours of a dominant subjectivity.

In keeping with an examination of elusive identity, Jaz Riley’s work, “Unveiling Visibility: Exploring Black Girlhood through Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Viral Media,” probes how black girlhood transcends racial and gender boundaries in pursuit of fleeting freedom beyond conventional frameworks of legibility." Riley also relies on Morrison’s concept of “invisible ink” to consider the interplay between revelation and concealment emergent within literary depictions and the material experiences of black girlhood.

Lastly, Marshall Smith references Morrison's concept of "invisible ink," depicting it as "hidden, until the right reader (dis)covers it," in evocations of hemispheric American swamp. In "Invisible Ink as Opacity: Embracing Incomprehension in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend," invisibility renders opacity. Smith mines the texts' swamps as spaces for exploration, freedom struggle, and self-actualization. Thus, Smith prompts readers to consider how we participate in the co-creation of such space(s) beyond the written word. Furthermore, Smith probes into how these black women writers reclaim silent or neglected archives from the depths of historiography, obscured by archi-violence, to tell their stories.

Collectively, these thinkers assert that black liminality nurtures a rupture in common revelatory impulses, revealing the profundity of black life marked as obscure.